Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in the world’s most important financial markets have been falling for the past decade. This has not been a gentle decline, but a collapse that preceded the 2008 financial crisis and shows no sign of abating. Public companies have been an integral part of developed economies for the past century and their apparent decline has occasioned a great deal of concern in the United States, including recent law reform attempts to reverse the trend.

Surprisingly, there has been no analysis of the phenomenon in Canada, where the proliferation of Exchange-traded Funds (ETFs) and the rise and fall of income trust conversions have made trends in this country difficult to see without detailed analysis. Insofar as the Canadian IPO market has been referenced at all in U.S. discussions, it has been said to be in good health, with little change over the last decade, and used as a foil by those arguing something specific to American capital markets has gone wrong. This is not true, however. The Canadian IPO market has also undergone a severe contraction over the past decade, and the differing regulatory and legal regimes between the two culturally similar, economically-linked countries can tell us a lot about what is, and is not causing the decline of public markets in the United States and elsewhere.